


No-Smoke, No-Gamble

by PresquePommes



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Retail, Aspiring Band, Communication Failure, German Eren Yeager, M/M, Roadies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-13
Updated: 2014-04-15
Packaged: 2018-01-19 04:41:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 9,019
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1455793
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PresquePommes/pseuds/PresquePommes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Levi has a customer.</p><p>He doesn't tend to look at his customers, but he knows them by voice, and this one's got some sort of shitty European accent and never buys cigarettes or lottery.</p><p>Which is pretty strange, considering that Levi runs the cigarette and lotto counter.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> What am I doing with my life? Falling victim to Ereri, that's what. Shit.

He didn’t really make a habit of looking at his customers.

He differentiated his regulars by sound, height, and colour scheme. They were colourized silhouettes in his mind and memory, and the only time he really bothered to look was when he suspected someone of being under the age of majority.

It was necessitated by the nature of the things he sold.

Levi ran the cigarette and lottery counter and he was goddamn good at it.

The fact of the matter was that he didn’t look because his customers were never present long enough for what they looked like to matter to him.

He was faster than anyone else in the store. He was faster than the computers. He had the reflexes of a fighter pilot and the fine motor skills of a calligrapher.

He was, as one of his regulars had pointed out, “obscenely fucking fast.”

So he didn’t look unless someone gave him a reason to.

He knew one of his regulars- a new regular, but distinctive, memorable- by the following characteristics:

Rough European accent. Dark hair. General impression of dark skin, leaning olive.  Tall but not tall enough to tower. Broad shoulders. Sometimes a sweater, sometimes a v-neck t-shirt. Always came to his cash but never bought lottery or cigarettes.

Purchases: magazines, chewing gum, an energy drink or two. Sometimes a toothbrush, toothpaste. He thought he remembered selling him condoms. He didn’t care enough to be sure.

He assumed the guy was under the mostly mistaken impression that going to the lotto cash was faster than going to any of the others.

Sometimes it was true.

Most of the time it was not.

His lines were proportionately longer than any other and sometimes even he wasn’t fast enough to dispel them before they grew to unreasonable lengths.

He just didn’t have the time or inclination to look at the one customer who sounded like an extra from a film about the Second World War and never bought cigarettes or lottery tickets.

At least, not until that day.

It started with a woman.

She was in a wheelchair.

His cash was tucked in an inconvenient corner, hard enough to manoeuvre in and out of without the added dimension of a chair.

He wasn’t in the habit of rushing people in wheelchairs. He figured they could take their goddamn time and everybody else could wait.

This woman was one of the rare regulars who he recognized the face of, mostly on account of the fact that he didn’t have to look up to see her.

Older, either in her sixties or a hard-lived fifty-something. Pain lines between the eyebrows but smile lines around the mouth. English a bit rough, but more than good enough to get along. Always bought groceries and lottery tickets at the same time. Didn’t smoke, thought it was a filthy habit. One of three people he let call him “sweetie” without complaint. Forever teasing him, telling him she’d take him away to an island when she finally won the jackpot.

It was automatic, at this point, to jump the counter and arrange her bags on the back of her chair.

It was just what he’d always done.

So when he heard that roughly accented voice say,

“That was a very, _äh_ , sweet thing to do for her,”

in uncertain English that phrased it almost like a question, he looked up for the first time.

“No, it wasn’t,” he replied mechanically. “She’s in a wheelchair. I pack other people’s bags and I pack hers. Don’t praise me for doing my job right. Makes it sound like it’s acceptable to treat people like burdens and do less.”

Despite his tone, it wasn’t really intended to be a criticism, just a correction- just another programmed response to something he heard too often.

He knew as soon as he said it that it had been taken as an admonishment.

In that same moment, he actually started _seeing_ the face that the voice came out of.

There was something about the combination of that rich, dark skin and those luminous eyes that was strangely transfixing.

The guy who never bought cigarettes or lottery tickets was offensively gorgeous, even when he was clumsily apologizing for his ignorance.

***

It had become a habit to look up when he heard his voice.

He was nice to look at.

The way he’d gotten shy since Levi had admonished him was a bit cute, too, and he almost appreciated the fact that it meant he wouldn’t meet his eyes.

It made it easy to stare at him.

He realized that it was probably being misinterpreted as a stare of disapproval, but it didn’t really matter to him one way or another as long as he kept coming to his cash.

He just liked to look at him.

***

“I’m not going to yell at you for asking for a price check,” Levi told him one day, amused by his subdued assurances that it was fine and he would take it at the price it had come up as. “I’m dead certain this is supposed to be on sale. It’s in the flier.”

“It is oh-kay,” the guy who never bought cigarettes or lottery tickets said softly.

For the first time since Levi had scolded him, he met his eyes.

They were still the centrepiece of that offensively gorgeous face.

“You’re getting the price check whether you like it or not,” Levi told him drily, already dialing for a storewide page.

 _“Price check, lottery counter,”_ his voice rang across the speakers. He pressed down the tongue of the cradle primly before hanging up the receiver.

He knew he’d slipped back into his old habit of using an unintentionally breathy tone over the loudspeaker when Hanji wolf-whistled at him from the door to the cash office. It was a remnant of an older job, one he fought tooth and claw to keep secret.

He’d racked up a lot of debt at one point in his life. Some jobs paid better than others.

“Your voice is very, _äh_ -” the guy who never bought cigarettes or lottery tickets started and then stopped, fidgeting.

Levi suspected that he’d realized just in time that the word he was about to use wasn’t one that could be reasonably expected to go over well.

It was okay. He had time.

It was a quiet day, the kind of day where it really was faster to go to his counter.

He examined his face unabashedly, admiring the high cheekbones and serious eyebrows that bracketed those too-large, too-bright eyes.

No-smoke, no-gamble shifted awkwardly from one foot to the other.

“It might take a while,” Levi told him. “We’re understaffed.”

The guy murmured something that sounded vaguely affirmative and fidgeted some more.

All in all, Levi considered it a moderately successful interaction.

***

“Do you want to see my band play?”

“Huh?”

His response was instantaneous, the follow-up almost equally so. “You’re in a band?”

His mind immediately summoned up images of strange European dance raves for reasons he couldn’t explain to even himself.

No-smoke, no-gamble backtracked as fast as someone whose grasp on English was good but not perfect could backtrack. “No, it is my friend’s band, I am, _ähm_ , someone who… roads for the band sometimes? I clean up after them.”

His look of frustration told Levi that he knew that he hadn’t phrased it correctly but couldn’t quite figure out where he’d gone wrong.

“A roadie?” Levi ventured, amused.

The guy’s responding smile was illegal, he decided, utterly fucking illegal. _‘Go back where you came from, you’re a goddamn distraction, blinding drivers and causing accidents,’_ he thought nonsensically.

His visible delight made Levi feel dirty.

He sighed. “When and where? I work until nine-thirty, I can’t guarantee you anything.”

***

The show was at nine-thirty, as it turned out.

Levi ended up working until ten to help with the mess the store had been left in.

They were a late-closing location, open until midnight but quiet after ten, and he was torn.

He could go home and do nothing in particular, or he could go out and chance no-smoke, no-gamble the disgustingly attractive European being utterly fucking wasted with the inevitably shitty local band he wasn’t even a part of.

He could do both.

“Hanji,” he decided, “I’m leaving my bag and keys here. I’ll be back in an hour or so to get them. I’m just going to check something out.”

***

And that was how he found himself in a hole-in-the-wall bar on a Saturday night, watching a customer’s face turn from sullen to surprised to glowing over the course of five mildly inebriated seconds upon seeing him.

“It is you!” no-smoke, no-gamble greeted warmly with an even more illegal smile.

“So it would seem,” Levi responded drily.

As it turned out, no-smoke, no-gamble’s friends had already played, and their names were Jean- lead guitar- Connie- on bass- and Mikasa- vocals- along with some petite blond kid named Armin who apparently wrote the band’s songs but didn’t participate in their realization on stage.

Levi stared at him blankly while he beamed, hand still extended towards them.

“You do realize,” he pointed out, “that not only do you not know my name, I have no idea what yours is?”

No-smoke, no-gamble’s smile dropped.

“ _Scheiße,_ ” he swore, face flushing. The guitarist started snickering behind him.

Levi rolled his eyes, begrudgingly extending his hand.

God, he hated handshakes.

“I’m Levi,” he offered.

No-smoke, no-gamble’s smile returned, albeit with more apparent shyness than it had before.

“Eren,” he murmured, taking Levi's hand in a warm, dry palm and smiling the most illegal smile of all.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I marked this complete, didn't I?
> 
> Oops.

Telling Eren his name had been a terrible, terrible mistake.

Levi was damn good at ignoring people. It was a special talent he’d cultivated over the years.

He had the enviable ability to utterly fail to overhear his name being said, even when it was being said to him by someone speaking clearly within earshot.

But there was something about how Eren said his name, with a round ‘ _L’_ , a breathy _‘v’_ and a heavy _‘i’_ , that he found himself completely unable to tune out.

For what seemed like the thousandth time that evening, he lost the vein of the conversation to the sound of his own name being said somewhere behind him.

“I’m sorry,” he apologized, closing his eyes and inhaling deeply, “can you repeat that?”

Whatever it was that the bassist- who was, as it turned out, the only member of the band who was _not_ from Germany or, in the guitarist’s case, of German descent- was saying to him was instantly lost to the sound of Eren saying his name again.

The most infuriating thing about it was that he couldn’t even take the opportunity to eavesdrop, because all he heard when he tried was,

“Some German, some more German, _Levi_ , yet more German _,”_

etcetera, so on and so forth, ad fucking infinitum.

It seemed unnecessarily cruel that not only could he not ignore the fact that Eren was talking about him, he couldn’t even understand what he was _saying_.

After a few more moments of watching the bassist’s lips move pointlessly, he whirled around without warning and fixed Eren with a displeased stare.

“If you have to talk about me while standing directly behind me,” he snapped, “can you at least do it in English?”

The guitarist cracked up as Eren shuffled uncomfortably.

He looked like he wanted to deny it, but lifted his glass to his lips instead.

Levi waited until he was drinking to strike.

“What, were you having a particularly engrossing conversation about my ass?”

He expected Eren to choke, but he didn’t expect him to do it so spectacularly.

“I was not-” he objected, still coughing. Levi watched his cheeks go faintly ruddy with some amusement.

“Yeah, sure, I believe you,” he drawled, “see, the thing about hearing your name said in a conversation people are having in a language you don’t understand is that you’re necessarily going to assume the worst. For all I know you’re talking about how you want to get me drunk and give me a Cleveland steamer or some other Hot Karl bullshit when I let my guard down.”

Eren fumbled with his words for a few seconds, visibly overwhelmed. “A Cleveland… streamer? Who is Karl? Is he from Cleveland?” he asked. Levi could hear his confusion.

The guitarist laughed and promptly proceeded to talk at him in rapid-fire German. The only word Levi understood was _Scheißen_.

If that wasn’t enough to assure him that he was being translated correctly, the way Eren’s face went from puzzled to dumbstruck to horrified was.

Eren looked to him with an expression that begged him to say it wasn’t true.

“I would- I would _not!_ ” he protested, beer tipping dangerously in his hand.

Levi reached out and pushed it straight with a finger before it could spill.

“Are you sure?” he teased, feeling rather than intending to wear the strange little grin that emerged on his lips. “I’m still not so sure you’re not planning to hit me with a Dirty Sanchez, if I’m being honest.”

The guitarist released an ugly snort of laughter, turning back to Eren with a grin.

He’d barely gotten started when Eren shoved his beer into Levi’s hands and clapped his own over his ears, cheeks and ears and throat gone dark with mortification.

He said something desperate and angry-sounding in German and walked away.

Levi looked down at the beer in his hands and sighed.

 _‘Well, that was fun while it lasted,’_ he thought, resigned to having scared off his most attractive regular customer once and for all.

Somebody plucked the half-empty beer out of his hands. He nearly dropped the fresh one that was shoved into them because he wasn’t expecting it.

He looked up, surprised to meet Eren’s stern gaze. “You need something in your mouth to stop words from coming out,” Eren scolded him.

He could feel the words coming.

He had to bite his fist to refrain from saying something outright inappropriate.

The guitarist- _‘Jean, wasn’t it?’_ \- was going purple with suppressed laughter. “Eren, you’re too easy,” he wheezed, shooting Levi a quick, “I admire your restraint.”

“Thanks,” Levi murmured, taking a sip of his beer. It was surprisingly good. The guy had pretty good taste, he begrudgingly decided.

Eren was looking between him and Jean warily.

There was a pregnant moment of silence before Jean’s restraint apparently broke and he leaned over to whisper something in Eren’s ear.

Eren stared at him blankly.

Levi may not have understood what it was that Jean said, but he couldn’t mistake the motion he made of gagging on something he appeared to be sucking on.

For a split-second, Eren looked like he was going to laugh.

Then he met Levi’s eyes, flushed so dark it was patently amazing he still had blood circulating anywhere in his body, and covered his face with his hands.

 _‘Fuck,’_ Levi thought, feeling a little too much like a little boy on an elementary school playground, _‘that’s really fucking cute.’_

***

The band’s songwriter- _‘Armin,’_ he reminded himself- was the sort of timid that he inevitably found himself being a little more kind towards, and once he got over the worst of his shyness, he turned out to possess the kind of meditative brilliance that Levi felt strangely compelled to patiently attend to even when he had nothing constructive to contribute.

He reminded him a little bit of an old professor. He also reminded him of something small and vulnerable. The fact that he only came up to Armin’s shoulder kept coming as a surprise to Levi, somehow- his mannerisms begged the assumption that he took up much less space than he actually did.

It was a lot easier to openly bully an infuriatingly beautiful tower of roughly accented naiveté than it was to harass this sad-eyed little thing with his too-long hair pulled back in an oddly delicate half-tail, especially when he spoke so earnestly in such cautious English, English that was perfect except for the stilted softness with which it was spoken.

His quietness was the only reason he had difficult hearing what Armin was saying.

Eren had either stopped talking about him altogether or had simply stopped referring to him by name in conversation.

It was both a relief and a source of aggravation.

He wanted to know what had been said. He wanted to know what he might be saying now.

He wanted to know, at the very least, if he was still being spoken about.

Levi wanted to know if he’d managed, in record time, to repeat the pattern of failure he had long since resigned himself to- if his foul mouth had shattered whatever mysterious illusion it was that Eren had seen when he’d looked at him.

He just needed confirmation that he’d already fucked it up so he could stop wondering about when he would.

He raised his glass to his lips before remembering that it was empty, and was therefore justifiably startled to find it not only full, but still topped with a fading head of foam.

Armin chuckled lightly at his surprise. “It is a mistake to leave Eren in charge of a pitcher of beer,” he smiled, “he is very good at refilling drinks without being noticed.”

Levi frowned down into the half-inch of white froth topping his glass. “Normally I’d say that’s anything _but_ a problem,” he muttered uneasily, “but I hadn’t really intended to have more than one. I can't stay long and I’d feel pretty shitty for drinking on somebody else’s tab, anyway.”

He was about to ask how much money would be reasonable to leave to make up for what he’d drank, but something in Armin’s expression stopped him.

It was the damning combination of bemused disbelief and dawning concern.

“Oh,” Armin said, and he had the terrible feeling that he didn’t want to hear what he was about to say next. “I am very sorry. Eren has been- have you drank too much? Do you need to eat?” He flinched suddenly. “The kitchen is closed, I think. Are you okay?”

He began to fish idly in his jacket pockets for his phone. “The kitchen here closes at eleven, right? What time is it?” That was the case for most bars in the downtown area. He needed to get back to the store before Hanji locked up. He didn’t trust them to remember that he’d left his things there.

“It is one-sixteen in the morning.” Levi knew he must have been making a truly awful face, because the very next thing Armin said was another “I am very sorry. Are you okay?”

“No,” he denied, both to what Armin had said about the time and as a response to his question. “Shit, no, it can’t be.”

He yanked his phone out, hoping against all odds that someone as smart as this kid was somehow also the sort of person who failed to correct the time on his watch when he moved into a different time zone. Logically, he knew that was impossible- Germany had to be more than two hours ahead and he sincerely doubted Armin was a recent arrival.

The numbers that flashed into life on the screen of his phone confirmed his fears, plural: it really was past one in the morning, and he had no missed calls or new text messages, which meant that, as he had anticipated, Hanji had forgotten and locked his things in the store.

Including his house keys.

“ _Fuck,_ ” he swore desperately, pressing his knuckles into his eyes and sitting down heavily on a bar stool. Now that he wasn’t preoccupied with holding conversation and fretting petulantly over what some beautiful idiot of a foreigner thought of him, he could feel the heaviness of his buzz hitting him.

Someone placed a hand on his shoulder. He looked up with a scowl.

 _‘Speaking of beautiful idiots,’_ he thought angrily and then inhaled deeply to calm himself.

It wasn’t Eren’s fault. It was his fault. He’d lost track of time. It was him who’d fucked up.

Eren studied his face for a long moment before asking Armin something in German.

Levi didn’t have to speak German to tell that Armin’s reply was something along the lines of a “Hell if I know.”

“I left my keys at work,” he explained, “I had to be back before midnight to get them. _Shit_ , I can’t believe this.”

Eren grimaced sympathetically before murmuring something to Armin, who slapped him reproachfully on the shoulder and rolled his eyes.

“He says you are like-” Armin started, only to be cut off by an embarrassed-looking Eren. He elbowed him away with an unimpressed look. “He says you are like the girl from _Aschenputtel_ ,” he told Levi, studying his look of bewilderment before adding, “He thinks you resemble Cinderella at the moment.”

Levi furrowed his eyebrows in annoyance. “I don’t think Cinderella ever got locked out of her house,” he snapped irritably. “And the only fairy godmother I could use right now is a locksmith.”

Eren looked puzzled, Armin amused. Levi watched their faces and let their unintelligible words wash over him as Armin said something and Eren’s eyes went bright with understanding.

“I do not think a bird would be very good at, _ähm_ , the opening of locks,” he said, pausing briefly. “Birds do not have the hands.”

Levi just stared at him while Armin launched into a gentle correction.

“ _Es gibt keine ‘die’,_ Eren. It is only ‘birds do not have hands’.”

Eren looked confused and angry. “ _Es ist nicht ‘die Hände’ in Englisch?”_

“ _Nein_ , Eren.” Context meant that Levi got the gist of what it was they were arguing about, but even if he hadn’t, it could not have been more immediately apparent to him that Armin’s tone bore a striking resemblance to that of a teacher explaining the same simple concept to an obstinate child yet _again_.

Eren’s eyebrows gathered together in what looked, at least to Levi, a hell of a lot like futile indignation. “ _Ich hasse diese Sprache_ , Armin.”

Levi lingered a moment, watching Armin sigh out a longsuffering “ _Ich weiß_ , Eren,” before standing and beginning to shrug on his coat.

“As funny as it is to watch your friend fuck up article use,” he interrupted, slipping his phone back into his pocket, “and as hilarious as I’m sure his English gets when he’s fucked up, I have to go see if I can’t break into my own apartment. Thanks for this. It’s been good except for the getting locked out of my house thing.”

He was almost finished buttoning up when Eren’s fidgety look of uncertainty found its way out of his mouth in the form of words. English words, no less. He was almost proud.

“You can sleep with me,” he offered suddenly. “I am alone in my room.”

Levi couldn’t help the way his fingers stilled halfway through fastening the last button on his coat.

Armin slapped a hand to his face, raised the other one in surrender, and walked away. Eren stared after him with a lost look.

Levi wanted to ask him if this was an ongoing issue for him, this thing where every second sentence out of his mouth sounded like a proposition- admittedly, a very tempting one, if he was pleasantly tipsy enough to be honest with himself- but he didn’t trust himself to defuse the conversational bomb Eren had armed without detonating it.

He took a deep breath.

 _‘There are so many things I could say to that,’_ he thought almost despairingly.

“Thanks, but no,” he said instead, dying a little inside at losing both the opportunity to mercilessly tease Eren for his poor choice of words and the opportunity to make some very stupid decisions in the name of inadvisable curiosity in one fell swoop. “I work tomorrow. Enjoy getting shitfaced with your friends.”

He knew rationally that it was the right decision to make, but he couldn’t help feeling a little angry with himself for being responsible.

“I will come with you?”

He’d already started to turn away when he heard it. He assumed he’d misheard. He told himself he had for the sake of his sanity. He managed to convince himself it was true until something caught his sleeve.

“Levi?”

Round ‘ _L’_. Breathy _‘v’._ Heavy _‘i’_. Unmistakeable. Impossible to ignore.

He swallowed a mixture of dread and aggravation.

Eren was looking at him with pleading eyes. “I will come with you?” he repeated more slowly, as though he thought Levi just hadn’t understood him the first time.

“Are you asking if you can or telling me that you are?” Levi retorted harshly. He glowered at Eren’s face and tried to decide if this was still a matter of the language barrier or if he really was offering to come home with him.

To his locked house. It seemed pretty suspiciously like a surprisingly desperate come-on until he remembered that he was locked out of his apartment.

He’d forgotten for a moment, transfixed by that stupid gaze and almost willing to hope.

The skin of Eren’s nose scrunched at the bridge as he thought about it. “I am asking but also telling?”

Levi sighed with exasperation and then caught the singer’s eye over Eren’s shoulder.

There was something malevolent in her unexpressive stare.

“Fine,” he agreed without meaning to, breaking eye contact and walking briskly towards the door. “But I’m not waiting.”

He realized as soon as he stepped out of the bar that he’d forgotten to leave some cash to make up for what he’d drank of their beer. _‘Oh well.’_

The night was cool but not cold, the sidewalks still wet from an afternoon of rain while the air maintained that touch of warmth afforded to it by the fast approach of summer.

He’d started to accept that Eren wasn’t coming by the time he reached the corner. The realization was met with an awful feeling of relief mixed with and flavoured by disappointment.

He’d just turned the corner when Eren caught up, breathing heavily as though he’d sprinted from the door.

“You are already this far away,” he complained, lapsing into a leisurely stroll that saw him falling behind Levi almost immediately. He groaned before picking up his pace again.

“I said I wouldn’t wait,” Levi groused and then shut up.

He wasn’t sure how to feel about what was happening.

The question of Eren’s intentions weighed on his mind oppressively.

The part of his mind that thought with his brain told him that they were almost certainly innocent. _‘He’s naïve. His English is a little rough. He has no idea what he’s offering.’_

The part of his mind that thought with his dick maintained hopefully that they couldn’t be. _‘Nobody old enough to drink is that trusting. He doesn’t have to have perfect English to understand what it means when a couple of strangers go home together. He must know.’_

The part of his mind that drew inspiration from a bottomless well of paranoia insisted that they were sinister. _‘He could be the next Jeffrey Dahmer. Young serial killers go after people they see frequently but have no close relationship to, don’t they? He’s planning some fucked up shit.’_

“Where do you live?”

Eren’s voice startled him from his brooding. He glanced over at him. “Not far. I walk to work. I walked here from work. Do the math.”

Eren mumbled something confused about not understanding what math had to do with anything. Levi would’ve laughed if he had hadn’t been so conflicted.

As he grew closer and closer to home, he grew more torn. _‘What am I doing? This is insane.’_

He answered Eren’s comments in grunts and indulgent hums right up until he had to stop him for walking past his apartment building. _‘Maybe I could’ve lost him somewhere along the way if I’d tried harder,’_ the paranoid part of his mind wondered.

“Hey, we’re here,” he snapped as Eren walked absentmindedly past him. He gestured wearily to a balcony just above the front door. “That’s mine.”

Eren trotted up beside him. He barely noticed.

“If I can get up there, I can probably lift the latch with a little bit of worked,” he mused aloud, eying the distance from the slight elevation of the front step to the concrete base of his balcony. It was too high to jump to. 

Eren wandered closer, peering upwards. Levi trailed after him.

Discouragingly, it seemed even farther away from below. He sighed.

The part of his mind that thought with his dick suggested that he reconsider Eren’s offer.

He didn’t have time to dwell on it before something grabbed him around the waist, lifting his feet off of the ground.

 _‘I fucking knew it,’_ the paranoid part of his mind squawked triumphantly as he twisted against resistance and threw an elbow behind him, _‘I fucking knew this would happen, I knew it, I told you-’_

He was dropped almost instantly. The grass was wet.

Eren was clutching his stomach and wheezing painfully. Levi scrambled to his feet. He could feel the ugly look on his face.

Eren lifted a hand submissively, waving it limply when Levi edged closer, fists instinctively raised to chin and chest level.

“ _Verzeihung_ ,” he gasped, lifting both hands and shuffling backwards a few steps before doubling over again to wheeze in another shallow breath. “I am sorry, I thought-” he waved in the vague direction of Levi’s balcony “-to lift you?”

As soon as he figured out what Eren was trying to say, the surface tension holding his fury together broke, leaving him feeling guilty and a little sullen. “Oh. Okay. Ask first, Jesus,” he muttered, dropping his fists. “That could work,” he admitted, glancing at Eren and up at the balcony. “If you still want to help me now that I’ve knocked the wind out of you, I mean. Are you okay? Sorry.”

The last part came out sounding kind of wooden and insincere, and if Eren’s breathless laugh was to be believed, he’d noticed.

“ _Bitte warten Sie_ ,” he panted, squatting on the grass. “ _Bitte._ _Bi_ \- Please. Please wait. You are very strong!”

He sounded surprised and a little disbelieving. Levi crossed his arms in irritation.

Eren peered up at him, eyebrows knitted together with pain. Levi was startled to notice he was smiling, albeit only a bit and somewhat awkwardly.

“But you are so small, also,” he laughed. Levi scowled at him, whatever sympathetic feelings he’d been nursing evaporating instantly.

“I will hit you again if you don’t shut up, you little shit,” he threatened, but Eren just laughed again, smiling strangely at him before straightening up from his crouch.

He was still rubbing at his gut gingerly. Even in the mediocre light of the streetlamps, Levi could tell his face had gone a little green.

He sighed, shrugging a shoulder irritably. “Sorry,” he repeated mechanically. “Go home. I’ll figure this out.” He had no idea exactly how it was that he planned to do that. Eren’s idea was the most plausible one he could come up with.

Eren shook his head, hands raised disarmingly as he approached.

Levi eyed them warily.

“I am oh-kay,” Eren assured him before reaching for him tentatively.

He reminded Levi of a man trying to make friends with a cat that had a reputation for biting.

He looked from Eren’s hands to the balcony again.

 _‘Am I too proud to do this?’_ he asked himself seriously.

He was not.

He beckoned to Eren to stand in front of him. “You’re not going to be able to get me high enough by picking me up around the waist. It might work if I climb up onto your shoulders.” He thought about it. “I’ll get dirt on your clothes, though.”

Eren had already started to squat in front of him. He looked over his shoulder with a puzzled expression that seemed to ask why Levi thought he’d care about getting dirt on his back.

Levi didn’t dignify that with a response.

After a moment of thought, he removed his shoes, tossing them up onto the balcony one at a time. “This better fucking work,” he muttered.

Running up Eren’s back was a weird experience, especially since he straightened up reflexively to compensate for the sudden weight. Levi had to grab his hair to keep himself anchored once he had his feet on Eren’s shoulders.

It wasn’t soft, but it was smooth and it felt clean under his fingers. The artful bedhead look wasn’t an affectation- it was literally just bedhead.

The realization made him a little angry.

He felt hands curling around his shins to steady him as Eren straightened up.

A thumb ran up the line of separation between his straining calf muscles. He felt the sudden urge to punch Eren in the skull for distracting him while he was in such a precarious position.

He stood up unsteadily, unbending his knees before letting go of his fistful of hair, and grabbed at the metal bars enclosing his balcony.

He lifted himself off of Eren’s shoulders in a single clean, acrobatic movement, curling his legs up and swinging his lower half backwards to give himself room to shove his feet up between the bars his hands held. From there, it was simple- he slid his hands up until he could make a grab for the railing with one arm, then the other, and then he rolled his body over it and onto his own shoes.

They did not make for a particular comfortable landing. Nor did the concrete.

It took him much less time to coax the latch of his sliding door open with the help of a credit card than it had to get up onto the balcony proper, so when it was done, he stared into the darkness of his locked apartment with a feeling of dissatisfaction.

He hesitated.

Eren was still waiting below when he leaned over the edge to check.

 _‘Don’t,’_ he told himself, and promptly did.

“Do you want to come up? I’ll buzz you in.”

***

Eren, as it turned out, was a health sciences major at the local university, and if Levi had understood him correctly, that had more to do with the fact that his father was a doctor than any desire to study medicine.

The more Eren talked- which was a considerable amount, given the amount of times the conversation dissolved into semantic confusion- the more he got the impression that he was only there to escape the pressure of other people’s expectations.

Armin was attending the university on full scholarship, studying something Eren either didn’t know much about or didn’t have the skills necessary to explain in English.

Eren had applied late, been granted admission by the skin of his teeth, and followed him.

Mikasa, who turned out to be Eren’s adopted sister, had also applied late, but she’d immediately been granted a full athletic scholarship on account of her remarkable abilities. When Levi asked what sport she played, Eren made unconcerned punching motions and shrugged.

Jean was born to German parents but locally raised, and he was old friends with Connie- a name Levi belated connected to the shaved head of the bassist- both of whom were technically enrolled in the same university as Eren but, if Eren was to be believed, only attended classes to avoid getting kicked out while they worked on making a name for their band.

The first time Jean and Eren had met, they’d gotten into a fist fight over Eren’s sister.

Armin could lie like a professional conman and had gotten them both out and into trouble on multiple occasions, depending entirely on how he was feeling about them at the time.

Connie’s roommate could and would eat her way through the largest of portions, and two of the local restaurants had banned her from participating in their big eater challenges.

Jean had approached Mikasa as a vocalist initially because he wanted an excuse to spend time with her, but they’d all discovered her innate ability to growl following an event that Eren steadfastly refused to divulge the details of and grew more and more embarrassed every time Levi brought it up.

It was a phenomenal tapestry of stupidity so poignantly characteristic of twenty-something year olds that he found himself laughing far more and far later than he’d intended to.

When the darkness of his living room started to surrender to the first damning fingers of light creeping through the glass of his balcony doors, Levi groaned.

“I have to work tomorrow,” he said, more to himself than to Eren.

He didn’t want to kick Eren out.

He’d pleasantly surprised Levi by being not only nice to look at, but generally agreeable and occasionally funny.

He wasn’t entirely sure what he wanted to do with him yet, but he wanted him around long enough to figure that out.

When Eren murmured acknowledgement and tugged his coat back on, Levi bit back the urge to tell him to stay the night.

He had to be awake again in a matter of hours. Sunday he worked a hellish twelve hours and Sunday was already well on its way to starting.

He lingered in the doorway as Eren fumbled out a clumsy goodbye.

Eren met his eyes and held them. In that moment, he felt it.

The scales of his uncertainty tipped ever so slightly to the left.

There was a palpable tension- a certain stillness between them that both demanded and forbade action.

He watched Eren’s throat ripple as he swallowed.

The crooked little smile that tugged up just one corner of his lips was reserved, Levi thought, but somehow the worst of all. It wasn’t as patently illegal as his general state of cheer both shy and self-assured, but made his eyes look wistful in a way that made Levi want to throw a plate at a television screen.

It was the kind of overwhelmingly offensive and wrong expression that simply was not illegal because it had no precedent and was beyond imagination.

It made him want to reach out and grab him by the front of his shirt, made him want to pull him back into the apartment without any regard to the consequences.

When his lips parted, Levi tensed.

But all he said was,

“Good night, Levi,”

before turning away and walking down the stairs.

Levi stared after him incredulously.

***

“You look pissed, and also like shit. What’s up?”

“Maybe I’m pissed at you,” Levi retorted immediately, not bothering to turn away from the cigarettes he was refilling. “You let me forget my keys here last night. And you just told me I look like shit.”

He didn’t have to look to know that Hanji was leaning on his counter.

“No, if you were pissed at me, you would’ve said something by now,” they mused knowingly, “so it’s not me. Talk to me, Levi.”

He shoved another pack on the shelf with more force than he’d intended to.

“Don’t you have some customers to annoy or something?”

They laughed instead of answering.

He already knew that they didn’t. Of course they didn’t. It was a Sunday evening, which meant that he was finally- mercifully- closing in on the end of his shift, and the store’s steady trickle of customers dried to nothing but a drip after six because everyone assumed that it had already closed.

There was a severe lack of clear signage available, and business suffered as a consequence.

He felt Hanji’s stare on his back.

“Hypothetical scenario,” he started, dropping the rest of the carton back into the box at his feet. “Someone at a bar offers to come home with you. You take them home with you. What happens next?”

“Well, since I’m non-binary and it’s apparently impossible to get laid in this town without feigning a gender identity, nothing, because nobody offers to go home with me, Levi.”

He shot them an unimpressed stare.

“You do know that of all people you could have asked to be your wingman, I am objectively the worst choice, right? That’s why you haven’t gotten laid, Hanji,” he muttered, “it’ll be a fucking miracle if you get laid because of me.”

“I believe in miracles,” they half-sang and then laughed at his caustic stare, waving dismissively. “Okay, assuming for a second that I wasn’t an unfuckable andro with a terrible wingman, _well_ … it still really depends. I’m gonna need specifics, Levi.”

Their expression was all feigned innocence, but he could hear the sing-song of curiosity in their voice.

He sighed.

“Okay. How about this: you go out to a bar because somebody you barely know asks you to, lose track of time, and effectively get yourself locked out of your apartment because you left your house keys at work like an idiot.”

Hanji chortled and shifted into a more comfortable position.

“Guy who invited you asks you if you want to crash at his place.” Hanji raised their eyebrows. “You say no because you don’t follow strange men to their homes. Also you work tomorrow.” Hanji lowered their eyebrows and pouted. “Guy offers to go home with you instead, knowing you’ve been locked out. Well, actually, it’s more like he tells you he’s going home with you and you don’t tell him to go fuck himself.”

Hanji’s eyebrows were back to being raised. Levi steadfastly ignored them.

“Guy boosts you up onto your balcony so you can break into your own apartment. In a fit of insanity, you tell him to come up.”

“Ooooh,” Hanji interjected, eyebrows dancing suggestively. “I like where this story is going.”

“Just shut up and listen, shiteyes,” he snapped. “You hang out with guy until it’s almost dawn just shooting the shit until you remember that you have to work a twelve hour shift tomorrow. He puts on his coat, you walk him to the door, he hesitates and then?”

“He goes in for a kiss,” Hanji guessed excitedly. “I go in for a kiss? I drag him back inside,” they conjectured in increasing volume, straightening up and flourishing with an exultant, “and we do the horizontal mambo until I have to leave the next day, causing me to come into work looking like I’ve been hit by a dump truck!”

He winced at their analogy. “And then he leaves,” he corrected mildly.

Hanji stared at him for a few seconds expressionlessly without responding.

“Are you _fucking_ kidding me?” they demanded incredulously.

“No.”

“Not even a phone number?” Hanji’s tone was so desperate he started to wonder which of them was more invested in this story.

“No,” he assured them, “nothing. Not even a last name.”

“Nothing,” they repeated disbelievingly. “What did you _do_ , Levi?”

He shrugged, kicking the box of cigarette cartons to the side and leaning against the wall. “I didn’t do jack shit worse than I’d been doing all night, Hanji. I guess it could’ve been a communication issue?”

Their eyes narrowed inquisitively.

He licked his lips, trying to find a way to elaborate without tipping them off.

“He’s, um, not a native English speaker.”

It didn’t work.

Hanji’s eyes went round behind their glasses as they surged forward to lean over the counter. “Are you talking about the German guy?” they pressed, “About this tall, broad-shouldered, skin as velvety and brown as a newborn fawn, eyes like staring into the ocean from a beach in the Caribbean?”

Levi raised his hands defensively, lip curled in disgust. “Stop. God, Jesus, just stop saying things, Hanji.” They were staring at him expectantly. “Yes,” he admitted reluctantly.

They shrieked in indignation. “You let him _leave?”_ He watched their hands fly up into their hair with a mounting sense of regret. “Levi, how _could_ you? That’s- I can’t- Levi, he was was lovingly carved from unblemished marble by Bernini’s chisel, given colour by the brush of Degas and brought to life by the will of the _gods_ , how could you let him _leave?”_

He grimaced. “When I told you to stop saying things, I meant right now and for the rest of your life, or at least for the rest of mine.”

He was about to continue when he heard giggling.

“Connie, shut _up_ ,” somebody hissed behind the shelves to his left. He narrowed his eyes at them suspiciously.

“Can I help you with anything?” he called.

He wasn’t surprised by the trio that shuffled out of hiding.

A still-snickering Connie, a mortified-looking Jean, and a girl he didn’t recognize but cautiously identified as Connie’s roommate by the sheer volume of food she was cradling in her arms.

“Uh, hey again,” Jean said sheepishly. “Wow, you really do look like shit.”

“Thanks. You make a habit of eavesdropping?” he spat.

Connie burst into giggles again. “No, I’m sorry, it’s just I overheard her-”

“They,” Levi corrected automatically. Hanji beamed at him.

“What? Oh. Yeah, I overheard they- I mean, them saying something about eyes like the Caribbean and I knew sh- they were talking about Eren and-”

Hanji bounded over to him, grabbing his hands in their own. “Eren?” they pursued. Levi rolled his eyes both at their unnecessary intensity and the way Connie shrank back nervously. “His name is Eren?”

“Wha- yes?”

They whipped a hand out to point at Levi accusingly. “He let him _leave_ ,” they despaired.

A switch had obviously flipped in Jean’s head. He cut into their wailing with a triumphant crow of laughter.

“Are you telling me that Jaeger didn’t make a move?” he demanded, something wicked dancing in his eyes as he shoved past Connie and Connie’s roommate to lean on Levi’s counter. “I fucking knew it. I fucking _knew_ he wouldn’t have the guts, I fucking called it!” He slammed a fist down on the painted wood emphatically. “I knew there was a reason he wouldn’t tell us what happened, he got all the way to your front door and then chickened out, I _fucking knew it!”_

“Actually,” Levi murmured, eying the spot Jean had smacked with some distaste, “he made it all the way inside my apartment and then stayed there for almost three hours.”

Jean howled. “Are you kidding me right now? No, look, here’s the thing, he’s been coming here-”

“Jean, don’t be a dick,” Connie interrupted. His roommate echoed something to the same effect with much less conviction, apparently preoccupied with juggling the load in her arms onto the counter so it could be purchased.

“No, he had the _perfect_ opportunity to make a move and he chickened out, I get to say what I want,” Jean insisted before whirling back around to lean on the countertop again. “This guy has been coming here for _months_.”

“I know,” Levi pointed out drily.

“No, you don’t, you don’t get it: Jaeger lives in a dorm on _the other end of campus_ ,” he hissed gleefully, “you can _see_ a Walmart from his dorm room window. There are _three_ different corner stores between there and here, and yet he only,” he jabbed a finger down on the wood, “comes _,_ ” another jab, “ _here._ I had to get him drunk off his ass last week to get him to come out with it, and do you know what he told me?”

Levi looked to Hanji for help. They ignored him in favour of ringing through Connie’s roommate’s order while whispering what looked to be a number of invasive questions to a mostly unaffected roommate.

“I can imagine,” he ventured.

“That fucking freak told me he’s been coming here because there’s someone he likes to see, but he refused flat- _fucking_ -out when I told him to just go for it and invite them to one of our shows,” Jean raved, “so I told him that if he didn’t get his creepy ass in gear and at least ask, I was going to come in here and tell them everything he told me.”

“Which you’re now doing anyway,” Levi commented.

Jean paused for a second. “Yeah, but only because he pissed his pants and booked it instead of taking a chance and going for the happy ending to an already pretty good night,” he said dismissively, “I mean, I don’t fucking understand how that guy works. He tells me all this shit and I’m thinking, _damn,_ this has gotta be something really special- I mean, have you seen his sister- and then _you_ show up and I’m- uh, no offense, man-”

“None taken,” Levi replied easily, “I’m not into equestrian anyway.”

“Haha, because I’ve never heard that before,” Jean griped, “fuck, you’re perfect for each other. _Anyway_ , Jaeger’s being a fucking disgrace to Germany and we’re playing again tonight, so you should come.”

He paused, thrown off by the sudden invitation.

“Wait, are you the friend who takes the piss out of Eren when he fucks up or are you his wingman?” he asked, disgruntled.

“Both, clearly,” Jean told him, looking a little confused by the apparent distinction Levi was drawing between the two, “Jaeger’s a pretty good guy, but have you seen any pictures of him as a teenager? He hit the last part of puberty just in time to come over here looking like a fucking Hollister model, it’s unnatural, I hate that,” he complained. “So are you coming tonight or not?”

Levi blinked, looking past him to Hanji, who had both thumbs raised and was slowly elevating their hands with a disconcertingly intense expression.

“Uh,” he answered.

“Go,” Hanji whispered.

“My shift doesn’t end for another twenty minutes,” he pointed out.

“ _Go_ ,” Hanji hissed, raised thumbs now extended at full arm’s length above their head. “Bring back stories. None of this _‘and then he left’_ bullshit, Levi. I want _results_. The winds of getting fucked are changing,” they breathed.

He stared openly at them.

“I would do anything to get you to just _stop_ _talking_ ,” he marveled.

“So are you coming?” Jean asked him impatiently.

Levi stared down his nose at him like he was an idiot.

“Of course I’m fucking coming.”

***

Eren nearly dropped an amp when he saw him.

He shot Jean a look of pure _‘et tu, Brute?’_ betrayal.

Jean just sniggered and draped an arm around Levi’s shoulders.

“Don’t touch me,” Levi said immediately.

“Oh, sorry,” he apologized, withdrawing it.

Eren looked like he was considering crawling under a table to die.

Levi watched his face redden and eyes flit over to a Connie who was very poorly pretending not to notice, a Sasha who genuinely was too engrossed in her food to notice, and a particularly unsympathetic looking Armin.

“ _Ich werde dich nicht retten_ , Eren,” he refused, and in that moment the floodgates of embarrassment opened in his face, darkening his skin from his throat to the tips of his ears.

“ _Hallo_ ,” he greeted nervously. “You look good.”

Levi quirked an eyebrow at him. “No, I look like I got hit by a dump truck because I got next to no sleep last night and worked all through today,” he refuted.

Eren deflated. “Sorry.”

“I don’t work tomorrow.”

Eren’s look of confusion was worth every second of his own. “What?”

“I don’t work tomorrow,” he repeated.

Eren furrowed his brows. “I do not understand.”

“You will,” he assured him drily. “What are you drinking? I owe you drinks from last night.”

***

Eren’s stupidity was a force to be reckoned with.

Levi had the capacity for great patience.

Since Jean had helpfully word-vomited up the context for Eren’s peculiar behaviour, he’d begun seeing Eren’s mannerisms without the obfuscating veil of uncertainty.

He saw the way Eren glanced at him surreptitiously every once in a while to see if he was looking back.

He noticed how Eren flushed when he made a point of stealing a drink from his beer, an act of mischief done in the name of science. Hanji would be proud.

He noticed how Eren grew increasingly perplexed and frantic over the course of the evening as Jean answered his every attempt at an interrogation by calling Levi over with a wicked little conspiratorial grin.

Levi’s patience was growing dangerously thin by the time they left the bar.

He was running on fumes and Eren was being just as unhelpfully attractive and obtuse as he’d been the night before.

Eren shuffled from one foot to the other when Levi told him he wasn’t following the band back to Armin and Mikasa’s apartment.

“Oh,” he accepted reluctantly, “good night, Levi.”

“Are you _fucking_ with me right now?” Levi asked him incredulously.

His answering confusion was enough to snap Levi’s fraying tolerance.

He grabbed him by his hair and dragged him down, kissing him with all the force of his pent-up frustration. It was rougher than it should have been, involved considerably more teeth than it should have, and somebody was wolf whistling and making howling noises at them. He suspected he knew who.

“Call me, you dumb piece of shit,” he growled as he pulled away, shoving the paper he’d had the foresight to scribble his number on earlier into Eren’s hand and turning away.

It should’ve been a cinematic exit, but he’d only gotten two steps when Eren stopped staring vacantly at the scrap of paper in his palm and lunged forward, grabbing Levi by the arm and hauling him back.

He didn’t even have the time to object or throw a punch before Eren was kissing him back, one arm looped around his waist and the other cupping his cheek, and unlike Levi’s kiss, which was more of a poorly aimed headbutt fuelled as much by infuriation as it was by attraction, Eren’s kiss tasted like fervent desire.

It made him faintly angry. Kissing somebody for the first few times was supposed to be awkward and uncomfortable, not enjoyable, and certainly not intoxicating.

Eren was breaking the rules.

“Get a _room_ ,” Jean yelled from down the street.

Levi flipped him off in thanks, burying his other hand back into Eren’s hair.


End file.
